Blehh, I’ve got my first cold of the fall season.

Thankfully, it’s not a bad one. Just enough to give me a bit of a snuffle and make me feel more tired than usual. It’s very annoying, honestly. Not bad enough to take time off of work, but I still don’t want to go out except when it’s necessary, and I still feel worse than usual when I am at work. Ah well, could certainly be worse!

Summary

Now resupplied with the means of sunless navigation, the Pequod heads southeast, towards the equatorial cruising grounds, where Moby Dick is most likely to be found. They are beset by contrary winds and strange calms, but eventually make their way to the fated zone of the ocean.

As they reached the grounds, there was a strange incident in the middle of the night. The sailors on duty heard a chorus of horrible, bone-chilling screams coming across the water. Some speculated that it was mermaids or the souls of recently drowned sailors, but Ahab explained that it was nothing more than seals calling to each other. Their course took them near some rocky islands in the middle of the ocean, and those seals sometimes get lost, mothers separated from children, and float near ships, calling into the night to find their kin.

The sailors still found this to be an ill omen, given that they also have many superstitious feelings about seals, which seem so human-like as they gaze up from the ocean. And, indeed, as the Pequod enters the cruising ground, a sailor falls to his death from one of the mastheads, soon after mounting it first thing in the morning. The crew throw a life-buoy after him, but it sinks just as quickly as he did into the depths.

The Pequod has no spare buoys, and no cask of the correct dimensions can be found. Starbuck is tasked with finding a replacement, and is about to give up when Queequeg suggests they use his now unnecessary coffin for a buoy. The carpenter is ordered to fix it up, and with complaints, gets to work.

Analysis

Finally, things have calmed down a bit, the ship is operating as usual, and what do we get? A heaping helping of ill omens! Also a member of the crew just died, but nobody seems especially worried about that.

The Fatal Plunge

An occupational hazard, I suppose. We already know about the mast-heads and how they’re used on a whaling ship, from that chapter ages and ages ago, where Ishmael muses about meeting his end in this exact fashion.

At sun-rise this man went from his hammock to his mast-head at the fore; and whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep (for sailors sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether it was thus with the man, there is now no telling; but, be that as it may, he had not been long at his perch, when a cry was heard—a cry and a rushing—and looking up, they saw a falling phantom in the air; and looking down, a little tossed heap of white bubbles in the blue of the sea.

Ah, the dangers of going to work while still half-asleep. Especially when your assignment for the day is sitting on top of the mast, a hazardous job in the best of circumstances.

The fact that everyone is so unbothered by this does go to show that death is not an unexpected thing in the whale fishery. It kind of puts Ahab’s madness in better perspective, it’s not that he’s simply doing something dangerous, they’re already doing that, it’s that he’s courting something beyond the usual danger that whalers expect to come along with their job.

Ishmael points out, in retrospect, that this was in fact the very first day of the proper search for Moby Dick on the grounds where he was most likely to be found. Meaning this was yet another in a veritable cavalcade of ill omens that have assailed the ship in the past twenty four hours. The contrary storm, the turning of the compasses, and now the death of the first lookout.

And what is the cure? Why, to make a new buoy from an unused coffin! Certainly nothing symbolic about that, I’m certain.

No Time for Superstition

The funny thing here is that the crew blithely ignore all of these warning signs, or are at least placated by Ahab’s clever arguments against them.

It’s the opposite of that common fable of the modern day, where someone tries to argue against some action because of tradition or religion, only to be undone when the truth of the matter wins out, in reality. This is that on its head: all of the supernatural forces of the world are trying to warn the Pequod off of Moby Dick’s train, but everyone is ignoring them. Except Starbuck.

I mean, nobody’s happy about it, but these are all eminently practical people, at the end of the day. The supetstitions are used to guide actions, true, but there are not many hard and fast rules, it would seem. People kinda tug their collar about the coffin, but whatever, it’s the best thing we got. Best get on with it.

This section is hilarious, reads like a sitcom script:

“Bring it up; there’s nothing else for it,” said Starbuck, after a melancholy pause. “Rig it, carpenter; do not look at me so—the coffin, I mean. Dost thou hear me? Rig it.”

“And shall I nail down the lid, sir?” moving his hand as with a hammer.

“Aye.”

“And shall I caulk the seams, sir?” moving his hand as with a caulking-iron.

“Aye.”

“And shall I then pay over the same with pitch, sir?” moving his hand as with a pitch-pot.

“Away! what possesses thee to this? Make a life-buoy of the coffin, and no more.—Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me.”

Especially the part after this, the long soliloquy from the carpenter, which is too much to quote here directly.

In effect, he’s saying he doesn’t like reusing things, doesn’t like making something new out of parts that were intended for something different. Which is an objectively absurd thing for a carpenter on a sailing ship to say, I’m sure that he has to do tons of jobs with recycled materials, so to speak.

Begin at the Beginning

I simply must quote this one line, which is one of my absolute favorites from the whole book:

I like to take in hand none but clean, virgin, fair-and-square mathematical jobs, something that regularly begins at the beginning, and is at the middle when midway, and comes to an end at the conclusion; […]

I feel much the same way as this poor, benighted carpenter, and it has caused me no end of trouble in life, because things often do not work that way. You come in halfway through a job, you catch only part of a story, you miss a day of school and have to catch up on some critical bit of information. It drives me to distraction, every time.

There is a desire to experience the entirety of something. I don’t even like watching streams of people playing video games if I can’t catch the very beginning, which means I don’t often watch them. There’s comfort in being able to process an event in its entirety… like taking every element of a job and breaking it down in great detail. Examining every significant event leading up to a particularly traumatic happenstance in your life.

Not unlike our old friend Ishmael, I’m saying, with his writing of this book. Trying to encompass an entire idea, and something as massive and multifaceted as whaling, as an industry, and this voyage, in particular.

Yes, this speech is a reflection of our author’s attitude, and also his judgment of the mass body of the crew: they were simply doing their jobs. Going with the flow, following orders, however you want to put it. They ignored the things that were obviously suspicious and just got on with it, and it lead to their doom.

Too caught up with petty worldly concerns to consider the magnitude of the danger they were walking right into. Oh sure, the job is easy enough, and whatever consequences come with it, well, we can deal with that when we get to it.

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Goodness, this post is long in the making. I have long since gotten over my cold, but I was on vacation right after that, and didn’t feel like writing while I was resting and recuperating. Mostly spent the time playing that new Atlus game, Metaphor ReFantazio. It’s pretty good, but shares some significant thematic/plot problems with previous games from that writer (Persona 4 and 5). I may write about it, if I ever finish it.

Until next time, shipmates!